What a great pleasure it is to read Seasons of a Wild Life – clear, agile, and multi-dimensional writing, the capacity to live a life of exquisite tactile earthly contact and illuminating awareness, the blend of fact and information, point of view and creature orientation, inspiration and grounded dailiness, all work together to make this a great book.  

Annette Naber weaves this effortlessly – so that the flow of seasons, with their distinct stories and yet integrated natures, come through these pages.  The book overflows with timeless wisdom, LIFE speaking to us with a very beautiful, vivid voice.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.” 

John Fox, Founder of The Institute for Poetic Medicine,
Author of Poetic Medicine and Finding What You Didn’t Lose

Weaving poetry, plant-lore, myth, ritual, and hands-on experience of the land, Annette Naber crafts an irresistible invitation to reconnect with Nature—our own and the Earth’s. 

Mary Reynolds Thompson, Author of Reclaiming the Wild Soul
and The Way of the Wild Soul Woman

I LOVE this book. A wonderful weaving of story and science and myth. In Seasons of a Wild Life, psychotherapist, naturalist, and forager Annette Naber encourages readers “to apprentice yourself to whatever environment you find yourself in.” By sharing a year’s worth of her own stewardship practices in the Virginia Highlands, Naber not only poetically recounts the daily lessons she learns from the native plants, insects, wildlife, and weather on her farm, but she also brings a global historical perspective on the deep human myths that still provide guiding principles and metaphors for living well in harmony with Nature.

In the manner of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Naber offers us an accessible and deeply felt memoir and guide to experiencing nature that will change how you pay attention to the passing of a month and awaken your appreciation of the forces and rhythms of nature so often obscured by the frenetic pace of the digital world. 

Georgann Eubanks, Author of six books from the University of North Carolina Press including Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction.

I cannot overstate how well written, engaging, and moving each chapter is. From poem to myth and personal experience, I feel held by, and included in, the author’s life and haunts.

Michael Watson, Ph.D., Blogger at Dreaming the World.

Seasons of a Wild Life is a thoughtful and charming anthology of nature poems, encounters with animals and plants, musings on myths across cultures, and thought-provoking questions that inspire us to a deeper examination of our lives.

The author encompasses a wide range of topics, yet writes lightly, holding the reader’s interest throughout the cycle of the year. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Mo Wilde, Author of The Wilderness Cure

As inspirational as it is informative, in Seasons of a Wild Life, Annette invites her readers to rediscover their connection with the natural world. She takes us on her journey from worldly-wise D.C. clinical psychologist to self-sufficient homesteader in the Virginia Highlands.

Through poetry and evocative prose, she guides us through a calendar year on her farm offering a glimpse of the life many of us dream about. Each chapter focuses on one month, diving into the connection between the landscape, the ecosystem, and her experience, offering unique inner connections to related mythology and folktales, as well as gardening wisdom, self-sufficiency tips, and journaling prompts for personal reflection. Whether you’re dreaming of finding your own homestead or needing to find a way to reconnect to nature where you are, get this book!

Read it one month at a time and travel through the year and the seasons with Annette’s insights, or devour it whole. Seasons of a Wild Life is a beautiful call to reconnection with who we are in relationship to the planet we share.

What a wonderful book! I love it!

Andrea M. Slominski, PhD, Author of The Victory of Ariadne

Annette Naber deftly weaves nature mythology from around the world into this inspiring gem of a book about seasonal changes on her Virginia farm. I savored every page of this remarkable book.

Laura Davis, Author of The Courage to Heal and The Burning Light of Two Stars

The more we move through the seasons of our lives with a poem in our hearts and a recounting of nature’s forces, the more we walk whole upon the earth. That is what Annette Naber does as she takes us through the garden landscape of her wild life punctuated with myth, meaningful symbolism, animal and plant medicine, wild food foraging, and more. In Seasons of a Wild Life, she re-educates our thinking about how to connect with nature and how to embrace the challenges we face when pursuing our dreams – even those given to us by a future self.  I am grateful to Annette for writing this book in answer to her question, How can we reclaim our lost connection to nature? This book is not to be read once but to be worked with perennially through each month and season of the year. 

Thea Summer Deer, D.S.P.S, 
Author of Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth

In Seasons of a Wild Life, author Annette Naber invites us to ramble through the woods and meadows of her Virginia Highlands home, to meet her plant and animal neighbors and learn their ways. Gently and beautifully, Naber’s wisdom, garnered through years of study and experience, unfolds before us, and we see our connections to the generous, wonder-filled world around us. 

As we turn the pages of this monthly almanac, we observe changes in the gardens and landscapes and become better acquainted with medicinals and food that can be foraged from the wild. We pay homage to the wisdom of ancient myths from around the world and to the animals who call this land home. Graced with poetry and personal stories, this is a book that you will want to savor slowly, month by month, year after year, as it draws you more fully into the seasons of your own wonderful wild life.

Leah Rampy, Author of Earth & Soul: Reconnecting amid Climate Chaos (2024);
co-author with Beth Norcross of Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees (2025) 

Clearly crafted with love and her life’s experience, Annette has gifted us an exquisite and intimate journey through the seasons of the year. She has beautifully woven world mythology, plant, stone, and earth medicine in with the tapestry of her personal wisdom and teachings as a lifelong devotee of Nature. More than anything, Annette captures the essence of learning through her story telling, humor, and deep respect for this Great Green World we inhabit.

An extra-ordinary way to learn about Nature in all her guises.  From her years of kitchen/homestead wisdom to brilliantly researched lore, this is one book that you will want to revisit to accompany your days deepening your relationship with Nature.

Kat Maier, RH (AHG), Author of Energetic Herbalism: A Guide to Sacred Plant Traditions Integrating Vitalism, Ayurveda, and Chinese Medicine.

What a rich and beautiful book about the natural world and the inner processes evoked by investing deep attention into our environment.  While Naber made the shift to rural living later in life, she comes across as someone who has always been immersed in land and sky and animal habitat. As she writes about her demanding work in home and garden, she reminds us that homesteading is not the dreamy relationship with nature we might imagine, but a lived stewardship. The journaling prompts at the end of each chapter invite the reader into a deeper relationship with their own experience of nature. 

Joyce Kornblatt, Author of Mother Tongue (2022) and four other novels

Annette Naber has chosen a path many dream of but precious few have the courage to attempt:  living simply on the land in respectful partnership with nature.  Her extraordinary memoir invites us into an intimate daily dance with the wild that is, at turns, breath-taking, awe-inspiring, and hair-raising—sometimes all at once. 

Seasons of a Wild Life guides us on a heroine’s journey [or: an inner and outer adventure] through a fascinating landscape populated by bears and bluebells, maples and mountain lions, gods and goddesses.  It leaves us in awe of the wisdom and wonders of the wild, reconnected with rich traditions of reverence for nature, and inspired to walk more gently on the Earth and honor our own true nature.

Kai Siedenburg, Author of Poems of Earth and Spirit series